How many pints of Chocolate Fudge Brownie has Ben & Jerry’s sold all-time?

June 17, 2024

Mmmm…


Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie 😋 It’s been my favorite ice cream flavor since I was a kid! And I found myself wondering:

How many pints of Chocolate Fudge Brownie has Ben & Jerry’s sold all-time?

Time to guesstimate! So here’s what we know:

  • Ben & Jerry’s was founded in 1978
  • Chocolate Fudge Brownie launched in 1990
  • It’s currently the #3 most popular flavor (behind Half Baked and Cherry Garcia)
  • Ben & Jerry’s sold 194,164,352 pints total across all flavors in 2022

I couldn’t find any other historical yearly pints sold data, so we’re going to extrapolate based on a yearly growth rate of 7.5%.

We know the 194,164,352 pints sold in 2022 is the result of years of growth from a much smaller number in 1990. And so we’ll use a rearranged version of the formula for compounded growth to estimate the annual sales figures back to 1990:

Initial Value = Future Value / (1 + Growth Rate) ^ Number of Years

so:

Initial Value (1990) = 194,164,352 / (1.075) ^ 32

which gives us:

Initial Value (1990) ≈ 18,227,830

So, 18,227,830 total pints sold in 1990. Now we're going to calculate how many pints total Ben & Jerry’s has ever sold using the annual sales calculation:

Sales for Year n = Initial Sales × (1 + Growth Rate) ^ n

which would give us:

Total Sales from 1990 to 2024 ≈ 3,167,213,715

And finally, since Chocolate Fudge Brownie is the 3rd most popular flavor, we'll estimate it accounts for a significant portion of the total sales. Let's say it makes up around… 10% of the total sales each year.

Estimate of Chocolate Fudge Brownie pints sold since launch in 1990


That would give us the total sales of Chocolate Fudge Brownie pints since 1990 to be ≈ 316,721,372! That’s a lot of brownies 🍨